The performance of hardware-based interactive rendering
systems is often constrained by polygon fill rates and
texture map capacity, rather than polygon count alone. We
present a new software texture caching algorithm that
optimizes the use of texture memory in current graphics
hardware by dynamically allocating more memory to the
textures that have the greatest visual importance in the
scene. The algorithm employs a resource allocation scheme
that decides which resolution to use for each texture in
board memory. The allocation scheme estimates the visual
importance of textures using a perceptually-based metric
that takes into account view point and vertex illumination
as well as texture contrast and frequency content. This
approach provides high frame rates while maximizing image
quality.